“I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with
unfailing kindness.” Jeremiah 31:3
Yesterday we learned the first prison lesson from Pastor Okuk Ojula who was
incarcerated on false charges for three and a half years in a federal prison in
Addis Ababa in Ethiopia.
When Jim Cunningham was able to visit him in the prison, he told Jim that
before the prison experience, he had centered his life on serving the Lord,
pursuing his education to the highest level (he has an MA in economics from the
University of Reading-UK), doing research work and other good things to help
people. But he had never thought of imprisonment as having any spiritual or
practical value. He commented, “Time was very precious to me and I never thought
of wasting it in prison sitting for nothing under a hostile situation.”
But God taught Pastor Okuk several lessons. The second one is that the depth
of God’s love for us is eternal. He says, “I was in prison for my
protection. God put me in prison beforehand to escape the massacre of the
elites and the educated people of my tribe in the Gambella region—the incident
of December 2003 that shook the media world.”
Genocide Watch reported that at least 416 Anuak people were massacred in
December 2003 in Gambella led by Ethiopian government troops in uniform, but
they were joined by other local tribal people from highland areas. Between 3000
and 5000 additional Anuak refugees fled into Sudan as refugees.
The pretext for these massacres was the ambush of a van on December 13th by
an unidentified gang who murdered its eight occupants, who were U.N. and
Ethiopian government refugee camp officials. There is no evidence that the
killers were Anuak. The Ethiopian troops responded by murdering hundreds of
Anuak civilians in Gambella and surrounding areas. They also burned their homes
and raped the women.
Sources indicated that those targeted particularly were educated Anuak men; a
tactic often intended to render a group leaderless and defenseless. To this day
hundreds of Anuak Christians are still listed as “missing.”
Pastor Okok is convinced that his imprisonment in Addis was God’s love and
protection because if he had been at home, he would have been a prime target
because of his education.
RESPONSE: Today I will walk in the assurance of God’s love and His
positive actions on my behalf even when they do not seem to be
favourable.
PRAYER: Pray for those brothers and sisters experiencing injustice without
the understanding of God’s purposes.
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